Maxim Gorki | Page 4

distant
Yakutsk, where he did not imbibe the untoward influences of the
reaction, remained unmoved and strong. Anton Chekhov, too, survived
the gloomy years, and grew beyond them.
He did not, it is true, entirely escape the influences of the time. He was
the delineator of the deplorable social conditions under which he lived.
But he deserves to be better known than he is to the outside public. His
works everywhere express a craving for better things--for the reforms
that never come. His men are helpless. They say indeed:
"No, one cannot live like this. Life under these conditions is
impossible." But they never rouse themselves to any act of
emancipation. They founder on existence and its crushing tyranny.
Chekhov is none the less the gifted artist of many parts, and imbued
with deep earnestness, who gave mature and valuable work to the men
of his time, which, from its significance, will have an enduring
after-effect, and will be prized for its genuine ability long after weaker,
but more noisy and aggressive, talents have evaporated. He was,
however, so finely organised that his brain responded to all the notes of
his epoch, and he only emancipated himself by giving them out again
in his works of art. And so his "Sea-Gull," "Uncle Vanja," and other
dramas, novels, and stories portray the blighted, hopeless, degenerate

men of his day, his country, and its woes . . . like the productions of
many others who worked alongside of him, but did not attain the same
heights of imagination.
Such was the state of Russian Literature and Russian Society at the
time of Maxim Gorki's appearance. He stands for the new and virile
element, for which the reforms of the Sixties had been the preparation.
These reforms, one-sided and imperfect as they may have been, had
none the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one
hand, a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from
non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial proletariat.
Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a phenomenon he
is explained by this essentially modern antithesis. He flung himself into
the literary movement in full consciousness of his social standing. And
it was just this self-consciousness, which stamped him as a personality,
that accounted for his extraordinary success. It was obvious that, as one
of a new and aspiring class, a class that once more cherished ideal aims
and was not content with actual forms of existence, Gorki, the
proletaire and railway-hand, would not disavow Life, but would affirm
it, affirm it with all the force of his heart and lungs.
[Illustration: Tartar day-labourer (After a sketch by Gorki)]
And it is to this new note that he is indebted for his influence.
Gorki, or to give him his real name, Alexei Maximovich Pjeschkov,
was born on March 14, 1868, in Nijni Novgorod. His mother Varvara
was the daughter of a rich dyer. His father, however, was only a poor
upholsterer, and on this account Varvara was disinherited by her father;
but she held steadfast to her love. Little Maxim was bereft of his
parents at an early age. When he was three he was attacked by the
cholera, which at the same time carried off his father. His mother died
in his ninth year, after a second marriage, a victim to phthisis. Thus
Gorki was left an orphan. His stern grandfather now took charge of him.
According to the Russian custom he was early apprenticed to a cobbler.
But here misfortune befell him. He scalded himself with boiling water,
and the foreman sent him home to his grandfather. Before this he had
been to school for a short time; but as he contracted small-pox he had

to give up his schooling. And that, to his own satisfaction, was the end
of his education. He was no hand at learning. Nor did he find much
pleasure in the Psalms in which his grandfather instructed him.
As soon as he had recovered from the accident at the shoemaker's, he
was placed with a designer and painter of ikons. But "here he could not
get on"; his master treated him too harshly, and his pluck failed him.
This time he found himself a place, and succeeded in getting on board
one of the Volga steamboats as a scullion.
And now for the first time he met kindly, good-natured people. The
cook Smuriy was delighted with the intelligent lad and tried to impart
to him all that he knew himself. He was a great lover of books. And the
boy was charmed to find that any one who was good-tempered could
have relations with letters. He began to consider a book in a new light,
and took pleasure in reading, which he had formerly loathed. The two
friends read Gogol